PWL Seattle: Lindenmayer Systems, Fractals, and Plants

Steven will be presenting on Lindenmayer Systems, Fractals, and Plants

L-systems are a mathematical formalism which was proposed by Aristid Lindenmayer in 1968 as a foundation for an axiomatic theory of development. The notion promptly attracted the attention of computer scientists, who investigated L-systems from the viewpoint of formal language theory. This theoretical line of research was pursued very actively in the seventies, resulting in over one thousand publications. A different research direction was taken in 1984 by Alvy Ray Smith, who proposed L-systems as a tool for synthesizing realistic images of plants and pointed out the relationship between L-systems and the concept of fractals introduced by Benoit Mandelbrot. The work by Smith inspired our studies of the application of L-systems to computer graphics. Originally, we were interested in two problems:
• Can L-systems be used as a realistic model of plant species found in nature?
• Can L-systems be applied to generate images of a wide class of fractals?
It turned out that both questions had affirmative answers. Subsequently we found that L-systems could be applied to other areas, such as the generation of tilings, reproduction of a geometric art form from East India, and synthesis of musical scores based on an interpretation of fractals. This book collects our results related to the graphical applications of Lsystems. It is a corrected version of the notes which we prepared for the ACM SIGGRAPH ’88 course on fractals. We would like to thank Aristid Lindenmayer for many stimulating discussions and guidance in the fascinating world of L-systems. Benoit Mandelbrot’s appreciation of the relationship between L-systems and fractals gave us the motivation for surveying the results obtained so far. Kamala Krithivasan guided us through the intricate world of kolam patterns. Dave Fracchia implemented a program for modelling cell layers using map L-systems; an earlier implementation was kindly made available to us by Mark de Does. The map L-system data files used to produce images included in this book were prepared by Martin de Boer. Lynn Mercer wrote utilities for printing IRIS raster files on the laser printer. Also, we would like to thank Heinz-Otto Peitgen, Dietmar Saupe and Gerhard Rossbach, whose interest in our work made the original notes and this publication possible. The support of our research by the Department of Computer Science, University of Regina, and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada is gratefully acknowledged

They'll cover up to chapter 3.3.2 which is in the middle of modeling actual plants, and maybe briefly mention chapter 6 which is other applications of L-Systems.

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